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The Senior Thesis

The Senior Thesis is the culmination of a student's educational experience. It normally consists of five sections or parts: Part I: Problem Formulation and Statement; Part II: Theory, Literature Review, Hypotheses; Part III: Methods, Data, Design; Part IV: Analysis and Findings; Part V: Summary and Conclusions. It is ideally written in close consultation with a mentor who tries to steer the student's work on a course that will prove most fruitful. Students are expected to become active producers of research, rather than simply passive consumers. This requires considerable familiarity with current research, for the department's practice has been to encourage its seniors to produce original scholarly work that contributes to a distinct subfield of sociology.

Although sociology's major paradigms can easily be understood with little quantitative sophistication, current research in the discipline's major journals uses advanced mathematics tools extensively. As a result, the department has a longstanding practice of encouraging students to take graduate or post-graduate level courses at other institutions prior to the start of their senior year, in particular at Ann Arbor's ICPSR Summer Institute, to consult with scholars at other institutions, and to produce the results of their thesis at professional conferences. As is normally the case at Reed College in the Division of Social Sciences and History, students are also expected to produce drafts of their thesis chapters at regular intervals, and in particular, they are expected to submit copies of a completed draft at the midpoint of their second semester. As is customary, the thesis concludes with a two-hour oral defense at which the advisor, two members of the Division of Social Sciences and History, and one external examiner, or "fourth" reader, test the student's ability to explain his or her results.